The Memory Trees

by Kali Wallace

  But now, eight years later, Verity was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. Her hair was shorter, a stylish cut that wouldn’t have been out of place at Sonia’s investment banking job, with threads of gray lightening the dark brown. Sorrow had looked past her twice while searching the room. She hadn’t recognized her own mother.

  “Hi,” Sorrow said.

  She didn’t let go of her suitcase or step forward. She tried a smile, wasn’t sure it worked. Her face was warm, her heart beating too fast. She thought about saying hi again. She thought about saying Mom, but her mind stuttered over the word. She hadn’t called Verity Mom in years, since the first time they spoke on the phone after Sorrow left Vermont. That first conversation had been painfully brief. Sorrow had barely been able to choke out a single word, and Verity had sounded like a stranger, eerily calm in a way that Sorrow now knew was an effect of the medication she had been on at the time. Later conversations had been smoother, easier, as Verity got better and Sorrow adjusted to her new life in Florida, but at some point, without Sorrow even noticing, the word Mom had withered to dust.

  “It’s good to see you,” Verity said. She started forward, paused when a man with a toddler on his shoulders pushed between them. Her lips twitched. “It’s really good to see you.”

  She held out her arms, and Sorrow hesitated only a second before stepping into the hug. It didn’t feel right; she was taller than her mother now. Sorrow had shot up to five foot eleven in the summer between fifth and sixth grade, giving her one wretched year of being the tallest person in her class. She had never realized it would translate into gaining inches over her mother too.

  “How was your flight?” Verity asked after she stepped back.

  “It was good. It was fine. Long, but okay.” Sorrow didn’t know what else to say. She couldn’t carve any thoughts from the nerves muddling her mind. She pulled out the handle on her suitcase. “This is all my stuff.”

  “All right, then.” That twitch of the lips again, not quite lifting into a smile. “Let’s go.”

  They walked side by side out of the airport. Verity stopped next to a green car, a Subaru station wagon. Sorrow’s memories of her childhood were foggy, often more vague than specific, but she remembered a car much like this one, older, dirtier.

  New car, new clothes, new hair. A lot could change in eight years.

  “Grandma is really excited to see you,” Verity said. “I hope you’re ready to let her feed you. She’s been baking all week. I tried to tell her that you’re just one girl and one girl doesn’t need five pies, but you know how she is.”

  Sorrow dug into her backpack for her sunglasses, mostly to have something to look at, something to do with her hands. It was easier to gaze out the window at the landscape than to stop herself from staring at Verity’s profile, at once familiar and strange.

  “I can probably eat five of Grandma’s pies,” she said. “Just give me a fork and show me where to start.”

  Grandma Perseverance never spoke—she had been mute since long before Sorrow was born—so there were no phone calls between them, only letters, actual letters written in pen on paper. Grandma’s tended to be full of news about the garden and the orchard, the weather and the wildlife, but little about herself. Sorrow remembered her grandmother as a prolific writer, filling journal after journal with her slanting script, often sitting up late into the night to write by lamplight, but she had never shared what she wrote with anybody.

  “Maybe you can convince her to take it easy while you’re here,” Verity said. “I certainly can’t get her to take a day off, or even sleep past six o’clock.”

  “I can try,” Sorrow said. “I’m looking forward to helping her in the garden.”

  “She’ll love that,” Verity said.

  “But you should probably be warned that last year I ran over Sonia’s hibiscus bush the one and only time I tried to mow the lawn, so I might be kinda useless.”

  She forced a light laugh, but Verity didn’t join her. She didn’t say anything, and Sorrow’s face warmed. She didn’t know if it was okay to talk about her stepmother with her mother, to joke about Florida while winding through Vermont, to mention that the garden at home was largely decorative, not functional, and that the only food they grew was basil and cilantro in pots on the porch. The two halves of her life had been separate for so long she didn’t know how to move from one world to the other, how to choose what to bring and what to leave behind. She didn’t know if Verity’s silence meant she had already chosen wrong.

  She cleared her throat. “You said you were thinking of hiring somebody to help out?”

  “Just for some of the extra work we have in the spring and summer.” A pause, a sidelong glance. “You remember the Abramses?”

  Verity’s voice was even, her tone casual, but still Sorrow felt something shift between them, as though the air had grown heavier in an instant. Her first reaction was a hum of fear: Verity had noticed. She had noticed Sorrow’s patchy memory.

  But in this, at least, Sorrow had an answer. She did remember. Many of her childhood memories were as frail as morning mist, but she could have been away eighty years instead of eight and she would remember the Abramses.

  The Abramses and the Lovegoods were the founding families of the town of Abrams Valley. They had lived side by side since the eighteenth century, two families bound by mutual suspicion and animosity for two hundred and fifty years, ever since the preacher Clement Abrams had accused Rejoice Lovegood of witchcraft. Sorrow knew that history the same way she knew the sun rose in the east and set in the west, a truth so unshakable she wouldn’t have been able to forget it even if she had wanted to.

  The Abrams family had occupied such a large part of her childhood it felt like they had been a cloud over the Lovegood orchard, a creeping gloom where there should have been sunshine. Don’t talk to the Abramses. Don’t trespass on their land. Don’t even cross the fence, and if you must, don’t get caught. Come tell me right away if you see an Abrams in the orchard. Those were the rules that governed Sorrow’s childhood. Those she had never forgotten.

  Mr. and Mrs. Abrams had worn country club clothes and looked down their noses at the half-feral Lovegood girls. Their daughters had shiny blond hair and prep school uniforms; Sorrow and Patience hadn’t been allowed to play with them. They were the only other children nearby, but their mother’s rule was absolute.

  “Yeah, I do,” Sorrow said. “Sure. They have two daughters?”

  Verity wasn’t looking at her now. “Julie and Cassie. Cassie is about your age.”

  And Julie was the age Patience would have been, had she lived. Sorrow’s thoughts quivered around their names, like rippling water in a pond. Blond hair, bright spots of color. Red coat, pink boots. Cassie, the younger, she recalled mainly as sneering insults behind her back, glares from across the street. She could not summon the details of their faces, but she remembered cold, and she remembered shadows, and she didn’t know why. She shook herself, focused on what Verity was saying.

  “You hired one of them?” she asked doubtfully. “Really?”

  “Oh, goodness, no,” Verity said. “Their cousin. He’s barely an Abrams at all. Only in name, really.” At Sorrow’s questioning glance, she explained, “Ethan is Paul’s brother’s son. Paul and Hannah, our neighbors?”

  “If you say so. They were only ever Mr. and Mrs. Abrams to me. I sort of remember there was another Mr. Abrams.”

  “Dean,” Verity said. “Dean Abrams is Ethan’s father, but he and Jody are divorced. They have been for years.”

  The other Mr. Abrams. That was what Patience had called him, and Sorrow had thought, for a long time, that was his proper name. He and his family had lived in town. Pretty redheaded wife with a sad smile, and a little blond boy who had once checked out the library’s copy of My Father’s Dragon when Sorrow wanted it. She didn’t remember anything else about them.

  “I’m going to need a flowchart to keep everybody straight. I can’t believe you hired an Abrams.
What about the whole . . . thing?” Sorrow waved her hand, accidentally knocking her knuckles into the window. She tried for a teasing tone, didn’t think she quite managed it. “Fight? Everything? Pitchforks and torches and all that?”

  Verity smiled. “Well, now, I know we’re not as cosmopolitan as Miami, but we only bring out the pitchforks for special occasions these days.”

  Sorrow gave her a skeptical look. “So nobody cares? That you’ve got an Abrams working for you?”

  “I didn’t say that,” Verity said. “But Ethan’s a good kid. If he would rather make his own way than rely on his family’s money like the rest of them, they’ve only got themselves to blame.”

  Sorrow shifted in her seat, tugged at the seat belt digging into her collarbone. Verity’s words ought to have been comforting. She was saying all the right things. She was calm, rational. She was smiling, joking even, about a topic that had been so fraught before.

  But she always had been able to smile when she had to. When the police came by, when the social worker visited, Verity had been able to put on a mask and become a woman who was a little odd, a little eccentric, but ultimately harmless. They had all worn masks for the world—for strangers. Patience had been so much better at it than Sorrow. Everything Sorrow had known about keeping their family’s secrets she had learned from her sister, but poorly, a clumsy imitation.

  Sorrow had been afraid, before she came back to Vermont, that she would look at her mother and see her sister. They had the same dark hair, the same long nose, the same sharp face. But Verity didn’t look anything like Patience. Sitting at the wheel of her Subaru, carefully signaling to pass a slow-moving truck, she looked only like herself, a middle-aged woman from rural Vermont. If her mood was a mask, Sorrow no longer knew how to see through it.

  “It’s going to be weird being in a town that has a population smaller than my high school,” she said.

  Verity’s smile was so genuine that Sorrow felt she was balanced on a precipice, toes curling over the edge.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” Verity said.

  Sorrow looked away. “Me too,” she said.

  The farther south they traveled, the more familiar the landscape became: rolling mountains and green forests, small towns surrounded by fields, old farmhouses in various stages of decay, horses and cows grazing in pastures. Later in the summer, after a month or two of riotous growth, the forests would become impenetrable walls of green, the heat suffocating, the air oppressive and hazy. Dust would hang above country roads in clinging yellow clouds, and everybody would yearn with sluggish impatience for the first crackling cool day of fall. But now, on the second Saturday in June, the summer was fresh and new.

  The sun slanted bright and blinding over the mountains, and it was late afternoon when they passed the sign at the edge of town. Welcome to Abrams Valley. Bold white letters on a green board. Heart of the Green Mountains.

  “Not much has changed,” Verity said softly. “We’ve got the same problems as most small towns, I guess. More people commuting to Boston. They laid off about half the workers at the quarry last year. But mostly things just kind of go on.”

  Along Main Street there was a handful of bakeries and restaurants, souvenir shops with T-shirt racks and postcard displays on the sidewalks, outdoor-gear stores with window signs welcoming Appalachian and Long Trail thru-hikers. A scattering of tourists wandered aimlessly. The quilting and knitting store was in the same spot, with the same carved wooden sign over the door offering Yarn & Fabrics.

  Sorrow swallowed, took a breath. “Does Ms. Cheek still own that place?”

  “She’s mostly retired now, but she still shows up to boss the new manager around a couple times a week,” Verity said.

  Ms. Cheek and her employees—all old ladies just like her, gray-haired and grinning—had always greeted Grandma with hugs and kisses on the cheek, opened a bottle of Abrams Valley cider before sitting down to haggle over prices and invent quaint names for Grandma’s colorful quilts.

  The library in its old Victorian house hadn’t moved, but it had been repainted a cheery bright blue. In the flat square park at the center of town a banner spanning two trees announced a festival celebrating the 253rd anniversary of the Battle of Ebenezer Smith’s Stockade, the town’s one and only claim to historical semi-fame. Below the banner a smaller sign advertised a twice-weekly farmers’ market.

  The grocery store was in the same place, with the same produce bins on the sidewalk, but the original sign had been replaced by a corporate chain.

  “I have to stop in for a few things, if you don’t mind.” Verity put on her signal to turn in to the parking lot. “I’ll only be a minute, if you want to wait. Or you can come in?”

  “I think I’ll wait out here,” Sorrow said. “My head is still all ugh from the traveling.”

  Verity nodded. “Get your first taste of mountain air. It’ll help.”

  When she was gone, Sorrow stepped out of the car and leaned against it. She closed her eyes to feel the sunlight on her face, to take in the sounds of the town. All she wanted was a few minutes of quiet to let the thoughts rattling around her mind settle. She had known this valley once. She had known this town and these streets. The people who owned these stores. The shape of these mountains, and the scent of these trees. She should know it still. She had been gone only eight years. That wasn’t long enough to forget.

  But forget she had. There were shadows in her memories, like low clouds casting swaths of landscape into darkness, and the biggest of these, the darkest, hid the cold late winter days when Patience had died. Dr. Silva said it was normal, but it didn’t feel normal. It felt like a black hole inside her, sometimes centered in her mind, sometimes in her heart, a well of impossible gravity distorting everything around it, slowly stripping the light and color from all the rest of her childhood memories, even the good ones, so gradually Sorrow hadn’t noticed it happening until it was too late.

  A shopping cart rattled and shoes scuffed on asphalt. Sorrow’s eyes snapped open, but it wasn’t Verity who stood before her. It was Mrs. Abrams.

  For all that she hadn’t been able to remember the woman’s name twenty minutes ago, Sorrow recognized her immediately, like a puzzle piece snapping into a scene that hadn’t made sense before. Sleek blond hair, tailored clothes, makeup tasteful and perfectly applied, Hannah Abrams was dressed for an uptown lunch, not a trip to the grocery store—but she seemed absolutely comfortable with it, as though she was the one who fit and the rest of the town failed to measure up.

  “You’re the Lovegood girl,” Mrs. Abrams said.

  Sorrow had heard you’re the Lovegood girl more times than she could count when she was a child, usually right after some stranger had looked over her homemade clothes and ill-fitting shoes and wrinkled a nose in disapproval.

  It didn’t sound any better now that she was sixteen, but she pulled up a smile and her best talking-to-adults voice. “Yeah, I’m Sorrow. It’s nice to see you again, Mrs. Abrams.”

  Hannah Abrams smiled too, more reflex than intent. “I’m surprised you remember me.”

  It was so close to what Sorrow had been thinking about she felt momentarily thrown, and she fumbled for a reply that wasn’t a defensive of course I do. “I, uh, yeah, it’s all starting to feel familiar, now that I’m here. I didn’t realize until just now how much I missed the mountains.”

  “It’s beautiful here in the summer,” Hannah said. “I’ve always loved the long sunsets in particular. Are you in town for long?”

  “A month,” Sorrow said. Across the parking lot Verity emerged from the store with a reusable grocery bag in each hand. “There’s my mom.”

  She didn’t mean it as a warning, only a polite way to extract herself from awkward small talk, but Hannah’s expression changed abruptly. Sorrow hadn’t even realized there was a softness in her face until it was gone. Her eyes narrowed, her lips thinned, and she squared her shoulders as she turned.

  “Hannah,” Verity said.


  “Verity,” Hannah replied.

  “Are you bothering my daughter?”

  Sorrow began, “She was only—”

  “I was only surprised to see her,” Hannah said. “I didn’t know she was coming to visit.”

  “That’s because it’s none of your business,” Verity said.

  She tugged at the handle of the car’s hatchback, then remembered it was locked and clicked it open. She shoved the bags into the back; Sorrow darted forward to catch a jar of olives before it crashed to the ground.

  “What?” Verity snapped. Sorrow flinched, but it wasn’t directed at her. Verity was glaring at Hannah Abrams, who hadn’t moved her cart out of the way. “What do you want? Are you going to make a list of what I’m buying? Do you want me to prove I’m feeding my child?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Hannah said.

  “Then what do you want?” Verity’s voice rose to a shout, and an elderly couple pushing a cart nearby turned to stare. “What do you want? Why can’t you just leave us alone?”

  Hannah looked at Verity, her lips parting with the beginning of a word, but she changed her mind and turned to Sorrow instead. “I hope you enjoy your visit,” she said shortly. “You’ve been gone a long time. A lot has changed.”

  Sorrow darted a nervous glance toward her mother and did not answer.

  Verity slammed the hatchback. “Get in the car, Sorrow. We’re leaving.”

  Sorrow twisted in her seat as Verity pulled the car out of the lot. Hannah Abrams was still standing beside her red shopping cart, watching them drive away.